I HAVE just come back from a visit to the Climate Change Camp site in Sipson.

I wholeheartedly support the camp protest because it has drawn attention to the implications of a third runway at Heathrow for our area and also to the threat to our planet from climate change if aviation continues to expand on the current scale.

I organised the first local meeting to discuss the implications of a third runway way back in 1985. Since then successive governments and the British Airports Authority have promised us that there would be no further expansion at Heathrow. All have broken their promises.

Indeed at the Fifth Terminal inquiry, BAA wrote to us promising that if permission was granted for a new terminal there would be no further expansion and no third runway. Within 12 months of that promise BAA brought forward plans for not just a new runway but a sixth terminal and now an even longer runway!

In the 1990s an independent government study confirmed that if a new runway was constructed up to 4,000 homes would be affected.

This means 10,000 local people either having their homes demolished or rendered unliveable by air pollution.

Whole communities would be destroyed including three schools, community centres and churches.

This would represent the biggest forced removal of people from their homes since the Scottish clearances.

The Climate Camp has given us the opportunity to put our point across in the face of lies and spin from BAA and the ignoring of our rights by Governments.

The organisers are committed to peaceful, non violent action.

Some will try to disrupt this for their own purposes but the underlying motive is to ensure that politicians in government no longer allow our transport policies to be dominated by BAA's search for massive profits at the cost of our local community and our planet.

John McDonnell is the Labour MP for Hayes & Harlington.